...(1) As this passage from Anthony Copley's late-sixteenth-century collection of witticisms succinctly demonstrates, there was a pervasive association between male beard growth and economic social status in early modern England. The old man in Copley's anecdote who asks a fool how to attain youth is told that he should either visit the barber, ostensibly in order to have his beard removed, or else bind himself apprentice to a master in perpetuity; according to the fool's rhetoric, the two acts are equivalent. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London, in fact, the one signaled the other: the presence of a beard advertised the completion of apprenticeship and the acquisition of freeman status. (2) So, the fool's logic correctly assumes that maturity and youth are primarily economic constructions that are constituted by the (regulated) presence or absence of facial hair. (3) Furthermore, since English boys who had not yet completed the terms of their apprenticeships were not permitted to marry, the presence of a beard heralded both the socioeconomic and sexual viability of its host to the early modern English imagination, mapping sexual prerogative over economic privilege. (4)

Facial beardlessness, then, by comparison--no less constructed than beardedness, though patriarchy tends to naturalize the distinction--acquired significance as a visual manifestation of the smooth-cheeked individual's deference or subordination to the patriarchal privilege inhering in the beard. But if the prospect of a boy's sporting a beard posed enough of a threat to patriarchal ideology to register as illicit, then how, we might well wonder, did that same ideology construe female beardedness? In what follows, I will contend that the female facial beard confronted early modern English culture with a profound contradiction that symbolically threatened the gendered economy of patriarchy with economic and sexual castration. Since the male facial beard operated in both economic and sexual registers to signal the privileges of autonomous viability, the female facial beard challenged that spectacular system of signification by which patriarchy naturalized its own constitution and so figured as a site at which the female body's economic/erotic significance required reassertion. Evidently, the female facial beard's subversive referential power could be mitigated only one of two ways: either through rein-scription of the bearded woman's body as subordinated to the patriarchal imperative of reproductive marriage (since, within that context, the female beard signals neither the economic and erotic independence of its host nor the failure of the patriarchal system of signification but merely an anomalous aberration of nature) or through annihilation of either the facial beard or the facially bearded woman herself. The bearded woman, then, whose beardedness might otherwise signal a viable ideological alternative to the gendered economy, is insistently reinscribed as an anomalous natural wonder whose beard does not challenge or contest patriarchal prerogative.

Furthermore, the female beard was imagined to exist in manifestations other than literal, facial beardedness. An overtly sexual or economically independent woman could, as we shall see, be allusively or metaphorically rather than literally bearded. But there was another more natural variety of female beardedness that, according to the dominant cultural rhetoric, signaled not female insubordination but rather female adherence to the patriarchal ideal. Take, for example, the anonymous "The Ballad of the Beard," which was first published in a collection entitled Le Prince d'Amour, or the Prince of Love in 1660. Although Frederick W. Fairholt, in his introduction to the poem for the Percy Society, reasons that "[the ballad] is evidently a production of the time of Charles I, if not earlier," recent scholarship has confirmed that the collection is in fact a souvenir pamphlet of the Middle Temple Christmas revels of 1597-98, the same revels of which Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, or What You Will formed a part in 1602. (5) The ballad spends most of its fifteen quatrains predictably extolling the virtues and cataloging the stylistic variations of the early modern English male beard, making metaphoric associations between facial hair and masculinity, beard type or cut and occupation, and, through bawdy wordplay, between the beard and phallic weaponry, confirming the beard's operating in both economic and erotic registers. (6) But in its thirteenth quatrain, the ballad shifts its focus to consider a variant of the beard that is decidedly less conspicuous than those treated in the rest of the poem:

I have also seen on a woman's chin A hair or two to grow, But, alas, the face it is too cold a place, Then look for a beard below. (7)

While the bulk of the ballad insists that the male facial beard functions emblematically as a visual signifier of economic and sexual primacy, the thirteenth quatrain concedes that women can possess not only degrees of facial hair ("a hair or two" occurring "on a woman's chin") but also, more naturally (since "the face it is too cold a place"), nether beards, which, according to the poem's rhetoric, are (like the penis and testicles in the Galenic medical model) hidden rather than displayed and so require male surveillance. (8)

In its naturalized, subordinate position, the "beard below" signals its object status--its submissive presence as both a source of male pleasure and mirth and also the site at which male privilege is both assured and reproduced. There is, however, always the danger (though the ballad seems interested in eliding this possibility) that, in the absence of male surveillance, a beard will appear on the female face and signal the woman's lack of adequate male headship--her economic and erotic independence, or, in Galenic terms, her unnatural masculine heat. Unlike the facial manifestation of female beardedness, then, the female "beard below" does not threaten notions of male economic and erotic primacy; rather, it confirms them by remaining discreetly hidden in a subordinate position relative to the male facial beard and by being complicit with patriarchal economic strategies such as patrilineal inheritance through its production of heirs. It is significant, in this light, that the transvestite women who cross-dress as males in early modern English comedy and romance uniformly present themselves as beardless boys rather than as bearded men, thereby deftly avoiding the spectacle of the facially bearded woman. So, even though Olivia apparently overlooks the disparity between Cesario's lack of a beard and potential as a suitable mate in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, there is a moment in the play in which Feste does not.

After Viola, cross-dressed as Cesario, gives Feste money for his "expenses," the clown prays that Jove will send the youth a beard. (9) Viola/Cesario tells Feste that s/he is "almost sick for one," to which statement Viola adds in an aside, "though I would not have it grow on my chin" (III.i.46-8). What, then, do we make of Viola's proclamation that she would not have the beard she apparently yearns for grow upon her chin? Is Viola implying that she would not have a beard grow on her chin (i.e., that she would have it grow on the chin of a husband instead), or that she would prefer it grow elsewhere on her person (i.e., not on her chin)? (10) Viola may be alluding here to her "beard below," acknowledging, like "The Ballad of the Beard" does, that such is the natural expression of female beardedness. These two readings of Viola's aside, then, may be mutually informative rather than mutually exclusive since both imply that Viola desires a beard that would both express her submission to male headship and elide any possibility that she might want to be a facially bearded woman. Moreover, Feste's and Viola's conversation about beards is initiated by an economic exchange, and the conversation ostensibly returns to money when Feste asks "Would not a pair of these have bred, sir?" (III.i.49, emphasis added). But Feste's breeding reference may well constitute further quibbling about beards, in which case the clown is bawdily alluding to the potential for beards to breed, a sense that is validated by Viola/Cesario's concession that a pair could reproduce "being kept together, and put to use" (III. i.50). So Viola's and Feste's bawdy double entendres throughout the scene tantalizingly allude to Viola's willingness to vocalize her own sexual desire, even if that desire apparently coincides with the patriarchal imperative that female beardedness be limited to the relatively natural "beard below," which signals its inferiority by dutifully breeding.

But few early modern English comedies secure the subordination of as many economically independent and libidinally outspoken women as Lording Barry's Ram Alley, or Merry Tricks (1608). The three main female characters in Barry's play all vocalize their sexual desires, possess or earn personal wealth, and, crucially, lack male headship; as a result, each of these female characters--a widow, a whore, and a female heir--is represented in the drama as possessing a metaphoric beard. Like Viola, however, each of the allusively bearded women in Barry's play makes it clear from the outset that she desires male headship through marriage and so aligns her potential beardedness with the patriarchal imperative. The complicated main plot of Barry's city comedy revolves around the efforts...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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